Future Pets

This episode is sponsored by Brilliant This year we’re celebrating the 50th anniversary of mankind walking on the moon, less than a decade after Gagarin became the first to orbit Earth. The first human anyway, it was a dog who made the first orbit. This episode comes out on April 11, which is National Pet Day, so I thought it would be appropriate to take a look both at how our furry friends have helped us on the road to technology and what might be in store for them in the future. Animals, parti

cularly our pets, played quite a large role in humanity’s rise, though often rather tragically as was the case for Laika, a stray dog found wandering the streets of Moscow who ended up being the first to orbit our Pale Blue Dot, though she did not survive the trip. It’s a sad reality that many critters have been sacrificed to scientific development, and while their loss has benefited humanity quite a lot, they are rarely acknowledged for that contribution. The silver lining is that many of our p

ets have enjoyed far happier and longer lives as a result of this knowledge too, and as we’ll see today, might reap many more benefits down the road. Needless to say pets have brought a lot of happiness to our lives, and research indicates they extend those lives, and help with stress and anxiety too. Certainly they’ve been a source of inspiration for many folks as well, indeed it’s a rare episode that gets written on this channel without my cat Prospero making an appearance at my desk and influ

encing my writing. However, back in the days of yore, they were much more directly involved in our day to day survival. Indeed while fire, spears, bows, and arrows often get touted as our big first technologies, dogs deserve inclusion on that list, joining us prior to agriculture and being invaluable as pack animals, hunting aids, and nighttime sentries against predators. Cats joined us soon thereafter and began protecting our stored crops from vermin and us from a lot of the illnesses transmitt

ed that way. I don’t think I’d be exaggerating to say that our pets have been a huge influence on our civilization, and indeed the development of animal domestication has a pretty good paw on being one of the late-era Filters we have discussed as a factor in the Fermi Paradox, without which advanced technology might not develop on other worlds. I think most would acknowledge pets' importance in the past, when they were primarily working animals, but their role in the future is a bit more debatab

le, as we don’t really need them anymore for specific tasks like guarding our herds or grain stores. Even jobs like seeing eye-dogs or sniffing out leads for law enforcement will presumably be replaced by task-built machines in the future. Though as we’ll see today, there are many ways they might continue in such roles or find new ones. However some of those domesticated animals we don’t primarily keep as pets may soon be replaced by synthetic meat. While I suspect they won’t object, the pig and

the cow might not find much place for themselves in such a world. This raises the very interesting question of exactly what a pet is and what we mean by that concept. I’ve heard folks say that cats and dogs weren’t our pets in the past because they were working for their living, but that strikes me as creating a false dichotomy and a bad definition. Our ancestors lived on the margins of survival, and expected their young and elderly to work, and also their furry friends. It hardly diminishes th

e relationship because it was pragmatic. Nor does it imply my relationships with my cats, a necessity for keeping rodents away in a rural area like mine, is somehow how less affectionate. My friends on the force who have K9 partners dote on those dogs, and my friends who use a horse to get around their farms where walking and driving isn’t always ideal certainly love those horses. Many of ancestors praised or outright worshipped animals in large part because of their utility and aid in survival.

The child or grandparent who helps the family with chores and support is typically lauded for such contribution, not viewed as a mere useful tool. So clearly being useful and earning your keep does not disqualify an animal from being a pet, nor is a lack of a job likely to see such critters disappear from our households. There was a noticeable dip in horse ownership between a century ago, when there were 20 million horses in the United States, and 60 years ago, when it dropped to a mere 4.5 mil

lion as every house got a car and every farm a tractor. But there are 9 million horses today, and that growth is even more significant when you consider that it's concentrated in rural areas where owning a horse is still practical, while much of our population growth during that time has been in urban areas where you can't keep a horse. Obviously, lots of folks just love horses. So what is a pet? We’ve often joked, half-seriously, that if we ever develop a super-intelligent machine that was frie

ndly or benevolent toward humans we might end up as pets ourselves, kept around primarily for entertainment. Of course an AI might keep more traditional pets too, something we don’t see too much in fiction, with the very noteworthy exception of Spot, Commander Data’s pet cat in Star Trek, interestingly one of only two main characters who seem to keep a pet in that franchise, the other being Porthos, Captain Archer’s beagle in Star Trek: Enterprise. Undoubtedly, this is mostly because animals can

be a bit of pain to work with on a set and the writers found human-pet interactions a bit mundane, what with a galaxy of M-class planets to explore. But we do see pets in science fiction often enough, they just tend to either be alien – like the tribbles from Star Trek, or robots themselves, and it’s certainly plausible we might see rather exotic, maybe even alien, pets in the future along with lower-level AI in that role. Technically a robot couldn’t be a pet, using the strict definition I fou

nd in my dictionary, “a tamed or domesticated animal”, but I suspect we need not argue the point, here of all places, where definitions often need to be broadened or altered in discussion of the future. The relatively simple Tamagotchi electronic pet device has sold over 80 million units worldwide and I doubt that any avid Tamagotchi owner would take kindly to you if you said that their Tamagotchi wasn’t a pet. Likewise, a tamed and domesticated animal may have been the only way to have a pet in

the past, but a critter genetically engineered from scratch that required no taming would obviously break that definition but be no less of a pet than one tamed from the wild. So the first thing likely to change in the future is our antiquated dictionary definition of what a pet is. And of course you won’t get a universal definition, there are after all such things as pet rocks and plenty of folks who talk to plants and tend them and invest emotion into them. We might snicker at that but most o

f us do talk to our pets, I do, and I am well aware that they do not understand me, I’m not even sure if my cats know what their names are or what a name is. We do obviously communicate, but I’m as guilty as the next person of anthropomorphizing them. Though I would argue that while a cat or dog, or for that matter a human infant, has neither the software or hardware for carrying on an abstract adult conversation, it is a bit different than examples of pet rocks, plants, teddy bears, or those ea

rly electronic pets you could get for your keychain or desktop. Of course traditional pets include goldfish or even ant farms, and I daresay neither of those communicate much more than a houseplant or rock. All of these shortcomings suggest some obvious ways we might improve our pets, or our interactions with them. For example, we might make them better able to communicate. There’s a Simpson’s episode where Homer’s brother invents a baby translator, and we’ve seen those for dogs or dolphins in f

iction too. You’re not making them smarter, just creating a device that more accurately and easily translates what they’re communicating already. Such a device would be very handy for talking back at them, so that we could explain to the furry devils that you’d appreciate them wiping their dirty paws off before tracking mud into the house. Though considering the difficulty getting young children to do this, in spite of having language skills, I wouldn’t be too optimistic on that front. Animals i

n general have even worse short term memories and attention spans than toddlers. So you might want to make them smarter. Needless to say this has a host of concerns attached to it, and many of us actually find our pets being rather short of wits, memory, and vocabulary a pleasant feature, as your cat or dog does not care if you slouch around the house in wrinkled pajamas and get behind in your household chores, and will not complain or gossip about it to others, with the noticeable exception of

parrots. This would bring up an interesting threat to privacy. Few people worry about their cat or dog hanging out in their bedroom or bathroom while they dress, and if we think about it at all, it’s usually to wonder what the critter thinks about us taking our fur off and putting it back on again. We rarely worry that our furry friends will gossip about our choice of underwear, or tweet about our physique. That’s only one reason why you might not want your pets much smarter. We also have to kee

p in mind that part of that relationship is the comfort of their dependence on us, they need us, which can feel good, and are fairly easy to tend to. We also don’t feel threatened by them, and that’s amusing in a way since our two primary pets, cats and dogs, are out of a pair of apex predator lines. They are pretty homicidal little monsters and might be a lot less cute if they were smarter. We’ve discussed uplifting before on the channel, where one provides technological, physiological, or neur

ological improvements to a species to bring them up to human-parallel levels, usually in regard to alien life forms we might find, or chimps or dolphins, but it works for pets too. In Rick & Morty, indeed in the first episode I saw of that series, which resulted in me binge-watching the show till the sun rose, we get an example of them uplifting the family dog, “Snuffles”. When asked to make the dog smarter, Rick claims that the whole point of having a dog is that you can feel superior to it. In

that episode, the dog figures out how to turn up the power on the helmet enhancing his intelligence, develops a distinct resentment of the way it was treated, then uplifts all the other dogs, who promptly take over the world and keep humans as slaves. Make our pets a bit smarter, and it might be fine and even beneficial, fully uplift them and even assuming they don’t try to murder us, we would presumably need to start granting them rights, like ownership and voting. But I’m not sure an uplifted

cat would make an ideal congressman or governor. You’d also presumably need to consider some physiological changes too, though while a cat doesn’t have enough space for a human-sized brain, cybernetic uplifting might prove compact enough to get around this. Pets also in general live much shorter lives than us and breed a lot faster than us. Needless to say, extending our pets lives is the type of genetic tinkering I’m sure we’ll see and sooner than later. As we discussed in the Science of Aging

, most of the techniques for extending our lives on the table will work just as well on other mammals. Life-extension methods are likely to be expensive only in the early days, and will get cheaper after they've been around for a while and the original patents expire. Indeed, since the regulatory barriers are lower, it’s quite probable we’ll have life extension medications and techniques for animals before we have them for people, particularly for lab rats. We’re already into cloning our pets, s

o this is merely a logical extension of that. A lot of us have gone through many pets over the decades as we outlive them. Often generations of the same family pet. We might run around as a kid with a dog and go to our final rest with its many-times great-grandchild at our side when finally the role is reversed and they outlive us. Many folks do worry about their pets and take measures to make sure a friend or family member will adopt them later, and certainly someone who is taking the effort to

extend their pets lifetime is likely to make sure they are inherited along with other priceless heirlooms. This, incidentally, is another pathway for future pets, albeit less organic ones. Thinking on fictional examples of pets, one that often comes to mind is the witch’s cat or wizard’s familiar, smarter than normal animals, often longer-lived, and with whom there is some extended bond for communication, perhaps even enabling their person to see out their eyes or hear with their ears. An examp

le of where fantasy might have nailed the future on the head better than science fiction. I can easily imagine people having pets augmented like this, technologically rather than magically of course, maintaining that bond with the pet for many decades or even centuries. However, it makes me think of another common trope of fantasy, intelligent magical items, heroes with swords or staffs or so on that are conscious and can talk to them. It’s quite likely humanity will hesitate to ever create a hu

man level artificial intelligence, but we might routinely create ones on a level with our pets or even close to, but not quite, human. In early science fiction we often saw humanoid robots, whereas we’ve tended to develop them rather inhuman in form instead. Isaac Asimov, the grandfather of robotics, once justified his humanoid robot prediction by saying that since high-level intelligences would be very expensive to make compared to the basic tools they might use, it made more sense to make a hu

man-shaped robot who could operate all our tools than make each tool itself intelligent. Thus far, that’s often not proven to be so. Computers and software are hardly cheap but the tools they might use often aren't either, and so we are more likely to make an automated tractor than a robot to run a regular one. Since a certain amount of intelligence and versatility would be handy, both for our interaction with it and for its ability to do its job, and I’d not be surprised if we saw almost every

complex device in the future have a certain amount of intelligence. It is quite likely we’d see intelligent houses, able to interact with you and with other stupider devices around the home, and also intelligent vehicles, where safety, and a perception of safety, will require advanced capabilities. In both cases people are likely to want something they can actually chat with too. But we’re unlikely to need or want something fully human in intelligence, and as we get into other devices something

on the pet level might be preferable. I don’t really need a super-smart lawnmower but some basic intelligence there might be handy and watching the thing race around the lawn chasing squirrels or playing with your dog or kid might be something folks would like, assuming it did not attempt to actually mow them. Regardless, if you have something like a smart car that is durable and self-repairing, able to drive itself and either see to its own repairs or report them and get permission to drive to

the mechanic, it would almost inevitably be viewed as a cherished pet. That self-repair aspect though highlights the increasingly blurry line between the mechanical and the organic that we’ll probably see in our devices, ourselves, and our pets in the future. Long before the lawnmower, we did tend to use goats for trimming the lawn, and it’s entirely possible that instead of a smart lawnmower we might just get tinkered and augmented goats in that role. Indeed as we’ve discussed with artificial i

ntelligence, one of the three main pathways for getting AI is to emulate an existing human mind rather than trying to program every line of code, or create an empty, naive learning machine that would need a lot of monitoring and guidance. This is hardly limited to human minds and as with life extension technology, early work of this sort is likely to use animals not humans anyway. Personally I think it would be rather morbid and gross to harvest a goat brain and wire it into a lawnmower, but a d

igitally emulated goat mind tweaked and loaded into one might do rather well and be happy at that. In the same way, we’ve occasionally suggested the artificial intelligence running a spaceship might be modeled on the mind of a whale or dolphin. As we get better with genetic engineering, cybernetics, nanotech, and self-repairing machines, that whole biological versus mechanical concept gets far more blurry. You might make a smarter dog or sentient car, and they might help babysit your kids. You m

ight give your kid a teddy bear who is their boon companion their whole life, watching them, teaching them, protecting them, and might be passed on to their own children in turn one day, as we often do even now with cherished toys. The car that always drove you to school every morning, the cat who taught you to read and maybe taught your grandfather too, the teddy-bear with built-in gatling guns that made sure the monster under your bed was afraid to show its face, and goat-mower who always tagg

ed along for your evening walks after dinner. The ethics of such things is maybe a bit dubious, but also not new. Many ethical challenges raised about technology are actually just minor variants of age old-ones, and while some might object to tinkering with a goat to make it a more useful machine, they’re several thousands years late to the party on that matter. Our techniques have obviously improved, but our ancestors very definitely, and very intentionally, messed with the flora and fauna arou

nd them to be more useful. If you’re ever in doubt about that, just take picture a poodle and a wolf side-by-side, or look up the history of a lot of primary food crops. Jump in a time machine with a bag of carrots and folks will ask you why they are orange. Whether or not all this tinkering is ethical, and that certainly should be considered on a case by case basis, it’s also not a new moral dilemma. Of course, our ancestors usually didn’t worry about the morality of it much, or at least didn’t

record such debates, perhaps because the process tended to be very slow and incremental. There are many more options on the table for pets once we consider using high-tech modification. Fiction has shown us a lot of alien pets, one of my favorites being the Fire Lizards of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series, small fire-breathing critters of modest intelligence and telepathy who are later engineered into full blown dragons. Such options are on the table for us, installing technological

telepathy or even creating a genetic or cybernetic hybrid able to genuinely breathe fire, though I don’t know if you'd want something like that living in your house, with its valuable and flammable objects and persons. Any number of mythological critters might be spawned from labs. Thinking back on the virtual and electronic pets that we mentioned earlier, you might have purely digital companions who live in the virtual landscapes and worlds that are likely to accumulate on our future computer

networks, see the Virtual Worlds episode from a few months back for details. It is easy to imagine that folks might have a virtual castle somewhere with entirely virtual pets, who hardly need to worry about normal biological limitations, and who can presumably be every bit as real and conscious as us or our cats. You could ride around on your virtual dragon because physics and aerodynamics and economic considerations of feeding it will be of no concern. Indeed, you might tend to take your flesh-

and-blood pets with you into these virtual worlds. Your dog or cat might enjoy running around virtual worlds as much as you do and if you transition to a post-biological existence in a digital world, you bring them with you, like some Egyptian pharaoh of yore having their pets and household mummified for the post-mortal world, but presumably more effectively. In previous episodes, we’ve talked about how if generation ships or space habitats get crowded on long voyages, we might see folks go on i

ce or upload their mind to digital layers of the ship to make room for new people. It's presumably even easier to simulate a landscape that Rover will enjoy. As we often say here, the digital versus biological concern is often presented as the distinguishing characteristic of what sort of entity or person we’re discussing, but is really just the substrate they’re on, hardly irrelevant but not really any more important as a trait than if the house they live in is made of wood, brick, or stone. Th

e same presumably applies to pets, maybe more so since they won’t be prone to existential worries and dread, so I suspect we’ll see them tag along with us to every new world and experience we visit or create, be it around distant stars or digital landscapes. All those billions and billions of worlds we’ll one day forge, we will share with them, and all the other critters we evolved alongside or may one day make. In that regard, I’d say the future looks pretty bright for our furry friends, and th

e not so furry ones too. In the meantime, since this is National Pet Day, make sure to give your friend a good headrub and scratch on the ears. Much of what we discussed today focused on cognition and learning for our pets, and of course learning is our main goal here too. One of best approaches to that is to do it at your own pace but to do it every day, and I always do some sort of puzzle along with my morning coffee to get the brain warmed up for the day. One of my favorites for these is the

Daily Problems from Brilliant. Every day, they publish several problems that provide a quick and fascinating view into math, logic, science, engineering, or computer science. Some of the more recent ones included piloting and navigating a solar sail spaceship, cutting a Mobius Strip in half, and escaping from a room by outwitting the guards. And if you like a problem and want to learn more, there’s a course quiz that explores it in greater detail. If you are confused and need more guidance, ther

e’s a community of thousands of learners discussing the problems and writing solutions. Daily problems are thought provoking challenges that will lead you from curiosity to mastery one day at a time. Learning should be fun, that’s something we obviously believe in here at SFIA, and so does Brilliant. If you want to learn more of the math and science shaping our world, go to brilliant.org/IsaacArthur and sign up for free. And also, the first 200 people that go to that link will get 20% off the an

nual Premium subscription. So we talked today about pets and possibly blurry lines between intelligent machines and tools and those pets, and next week we’ll be looking at a classic example of that in science fiction, power suits that would augment the body and likely have sophisticated computers on board too. But we’ll also be looking at giant robots people might pilot into war, often known as mecha, and find out what the first rule of warfare is, in Giant Robots & Power Suits. The week after t

hat, we’ll head back to the Earth 2.0 series to conclude our main arc of the series, by examining Matrioshka Worlds, many layered planets that let you vastly increase the living area of a planet, and how Earth itself is likely to become such a world one day. For alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel and hit the notifications bell. And if you enjoyed this episode, hit the like button and share it with others. Until next time, thanks for watching, and

have a Great Week!